1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to the technical field of servicing alarms and performing maintenance on heterogeneous computer platforms and, in particular, to an expert system comprising a client/server notification system for reporting diverse alarm diagnostic and nodal identification data and a generalized inference engine for receiving the data and, responsive thereto, performing a frame-based analysis to match the diagnostic data to potential resolutions and outputting a resolution for computer platform implementation.
2. Description of the Related Arts
Localized notification systems are known from, for example, the article xe2x80x9cNotification Systemsxe2x80x9d by Stewart McKie, published in DBMS ONLINE, February, 1997, at dbmsmag.com on the World Wide Web. In computer systems, notifications occur as the result of an event which may be a system event, such as the addition or failure of a component, or a business event, such as a successful posting of a transaction to an accounting system. There exist many types of notifications including: informational notifications, prompting notifications, alerting notifications, exception notifications and the like. Notifications are typically triggered immediately after the event triggering the notification. McKie discusses several business applications of such notification systems but does not describe their use with an expert system, let alone an inference engine, for diagnosing computer network failures.
A hybridized frame inference and fuzzy reasoning system and method are known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,175,795. Tsuda et al. describe an inference mechanism that executes human logical and fuzzy thought including intuitive thought via a frame inference engine based on human logical thought.
An expert system having a frame explanation system is known from U.S. Pat. No. 5,408,587 to Maier et al. FIG. 1 shows an inference engine for operation with a rule base and an explanation system coupled to the rule base and the system output for providing an explanation of a selected rule, for example, strategy or reason explanations. According to FIG. 4, after a fact is received at step 310 that fires a rule a rule at steps 320, 330, a frame is created at step 340 into which is placed the strategy explanation and the reason explanation for the rule class in which the invoked frame is present. The created frame can be placed automatically at the correct node in an explanation tree (FIG. 3) along with an inference explanation.
Also, an autonomous expert system for directly maintaining remote telephone switching systems is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,972,473 to Daniel III et al. FIG. 1 shows that the public switched telephone network may be directly coupled via modem to an expert system. The public switched telephone network may be considered to comprise remote computer systems. The expert system first accesses a fault report from a centralized service reporting center, establishes a data connection to the computer system reporting the fault, invokes diagnostic routines for gathering data and, if appropriate and possible, clear the reported fault from the computer system. For example, the expert system is capable of maintaining different vintages of the same private branch exchange (a private computer switching system) by interrogating each private branch exchange via the data connection.
Computer maintenance engineers (CME""s) wage a never ending battle upon the repeated receipt of computer event notifications. They must trouble shoot and identify root causes of possibly hundreds of different computer faults and errors for a given platform. Their experience and knowledge is learned over time from repeated successes with resolving faults and errors. However, the great diversity of computer system types and the inability of the human mind to rapidly retrieve from memory specific resolutions to, for example, more infrequent system faults or errors leaves room for considerable improvement in the fault and error recognition and resolution process in computer networks including one or more computer platforms.
Thus, there remains an opportunity in the art to provide a notification system, for example, that performs the routine tasks of the CME in analyzing an event to obtain a root cause of an alarm signal and an inference engine for matching the output of the notification system to an appropriate resolution to the alarm.
The problems and deficiencies of prior art notification and expert systems are overcome in accordance with the principles of the present invention, an expert system comprising a client/server notification system for reporting heterogeneous alarm diagnostic and nodal identification data and a generalized inference engine for receiving the data and, responsive thereto, performing a frame-based analysis to match the diagnostic data to potential resolutions and outputting a resolution, automated where possible, for computer platform implementation. Moreover, the expert system of the present invention is coupled to an explanation facility system for providing an explanation to a CME in response to an ad-hoc query and for reporting a best match to a resolution in the event a confidence level is not met by the inference engine in outputting a resolution.
The present invention is the subject of the inventor""s PhD dissertation entitled xe2x80x9cSystem Requirements for a New Management Control Expert System Generalized Inference Engine Interfacing with a Client/Server Notification Systemxe2x80x9d submitted to the School of Computer and Information Sciences, Nova Southeastern University in May, 1998, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference as to its entire contents.
These and other features of the present invention will be best understood from the drawings and the detailed description of the invention which follows.